It Seems To Me

Thoughts and Rants on Technology, Business and Politics

he advent of Tivo marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in the way that media is consumed. Sure, VCRs have been around for 30 years, but Tivo allowed for time shifting on a massive scale. People tried to explain the virtues of the personal video recorder in a myriad of ways: pause live TV, instant replay, never miss your favourite shows, etc.

For me it was simple: without Tivo there was about a 5% chance that, at any given moment, something would be on television that I wanted to watch. However, with Tivo, the odds changed dramatically. Now the odds are 100% that there is 100 hours of stuff that I know I want to watch. My shows . . . my time.

The iPod, and its numerous siblings, are now transforming the audible world in a similar fashion. Audible.com, online content, and podcasting have made it possible for me to preload hundreds of hours of content onto my iPod for listening on my time. The same basic formula applies: before the portable MP3 player, there was a 5% chance that anything would be on broadcast radio that I might want to listen to. With my iPod there is now a 100% chance that I have hundred's of hours of content waiting for me.

The media world is taking note. Dennis L. Haarsager captured the essence of the shift in a fantastic article called My Time:

We media professionals have always thought of ourselves in terms of functional divides — electronic vs. print, radio vs. television, local vs. national. Those dualities in turn govern how we organize ourselves, how we produce and distribute content and even how we think about our careers.

Out in the real world, however, a different sort of divide is emerging for media users — real time vs. non-real time. Broadcasters operate mostly in real time, but our listeners and viewers increasingly consume the programming on what might be called in ad copy, My Time — that is, whenever they choose.

It seems to me that the shift to My Time has passed the tipping point. USA Today reports that 10 million iPods have been sold to date, 8.2 million in 2004 alone, and nearly 5 million over the recent holiday season! Paul Saffo, research director of The Institute for the Future, says in the USA Today article, "This is all part of the shift from mass media to personalized media."

Indeed! The world is shifting from mass production and mass media to mass customisation and personalized media. It works for me.